Holizz versus the Web

My latest goal is to learn the first three grades of 教育漢字 (educational kanji) before March. My next goal will be to learn the following three grades before some other realistic deadline.

教育漢字 is a non-coded character set containing 1,006 characters, which are taught to children in 小学校 (little school). The first three grades contain a total of 440 characters.

I’ve already learnt all of the characters in grade one (80 characters) - I only needed to learn one I didn’t recognise and a few I couldn’t remember how to write. Grade two (160 characters) looks like it may take a little more work.

Maybe when it gets closer to December I’ll start learning kanji based on JLPT character sets.

会いたかったです。みんなに。

ちょっと前に日本語授業へ出かけましたがキャンセルでした。橋戸先生が病気ですから。仕方がないでも楽しみましたから今、残念です。

こんな事の所為でよく楽しみません。なんか寂しいですよね。

じゃ、一人で日本語を勉強しますから。

まあ…私にはちょっと子供らしいと思います。

一番の悪い奴がいつも負けて「ナニー？！」と言いました。大ステレオタイプなキャラクターでした。

このアニメの存在理由は作品を売る事だけではありませんの？

Why Pretty Cure　（なぜプリキュア？）：

* This proves that almost everyone watching Pretty Cure bought its toys!

たしかに存在理由はおもちゃを売る事ですね。（ところで、「prove」はちょっと違いますよね。）

良い所はね…えっとう…キュアホワイトの声優がCCさくらのメイリンの声優ですし、キュアブラックの声優が「耳をすませば」の仕手の声優ですし…以上だと思います。

これはトムの大アニメレビューでした！次回の記事を楽しみしてね！

一昨日、またダイアログを録音しました。

私が「母の金魚が死んでしまいました。」と言って、他の人が「わたしのすきないろはみどり。あなたは？」と言いました。

私がそんなに笑っちゃっていましたから録音をとめなきゃでした。

あのせりふの後で「好きな色はむらかみです。」と言いました。

と言うわけで、大成功でした。

IMEs are the best invention in the world. This week I’ve typed Ï€ and done some box drawing without having to look at 文字マップ (Gucharmap in this case).

Today I learnt Ï€ to 9 digits thanks to the Japanese language and this post. It was HARAGUCHI Akira’s recent escapades into real numbers that made me want to find Ï€ in Japanese phrases. It’s a great language for memorising numbers.

Today I have also been looking at fun things like graphical toolkits. It’s hard to put into words why GTK+ 2 could beat Qt or Tk in a fight. Just say that GTK+ 2 has a wider deployment and hope for the best. And then try to think up a good reason to choose Ruby over Python (I don’t think “Ruby is more Japonz” will cut the mustard in final year project documentation).

I shall probably start some coding of that soon (maybe sooner than my Gantt chart tells me I should be doing - but I’m sure I’ll live).

Well. I should go to bed now so I can go swimming in the morning and then write lots and lots of documentation.

P.S. I subscribe to the Doctor Will documentation methodology: have everything in a wiki then just print it out and call it a report.

Oh my god. I tried Damn Small Linux today. It has NO FONTS! It didn’t render a single character of Japanese. I was so not impressed.

DSL gets a holizz-rating of ♇ (that symbol means Pluto) - keep it up and you might be a real planet distro one day.

I just posted a personal looking for friends/penpals. It wasn’t particularly taxing to write, but it was good fun. I’ll post it here too:

ブラッドフォード大学校でコンピューター・サイエンスの勉強をしています。

ブラッドフォード・カレジで日本語の勉強をしています。そして、日本人と日本語の勉強してと英語の教えています。一年ぐらい勉強をしました。今年１２月に日本語能力試験の三級をします。

大学校のアニメとカルト・テレビ社会のプレジデントです。アーチェリーや柔術をします。そして毎週母さんと泳ぎます。

もと人見知りですから人々に会いたいです。日本人も日本語の勉強する人も。

英語で：

I’m studying Computer Science at Bradford University.

I’m studying Japanese at Bradford College. I’m also studying Japanese and teaching English with/to a Japanese person. I’ve been studying for about a year. This December I’m going to take the 3rd level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

I’m the president of the university’s Anime & Cult TV Society. I practice Archery and Juujutsu. I also go swimming every week with my mum.

I’m a former shy person, so I want to meet lots of people. Japanese people, and people studying Japanese.

Well my coursework is going very well. The application is complete. The specification said I should add an appropriate feature. So I internationalised it. It comes with British English (en_GB.utf8) and Japanese Japanese (ja_JP.utf8) locales.

It was fun learning new things about Java (which I am really starting to like… it’ll be Open Source soon, then I can install it). I learnt about Locale, ResourceBundle, Class.getResourceAsStream(…).

While writing the documentation I discovered that neither AbiWord nor OpenOffice.org Writer (I haven’t tried kword because SCIM and Qt don’t get on and I’ll be damned if I’m going to use a word processor that doesn’t let me type in my language of chioce) will consult another font if a glyph isn’t found (which appears to be what pretty much every other piece of GUI software does by default). Say the default font is Kochi Gothic (東風ゴシック), ASCII, Hiragana, Katakana, Han, and Ideographic Punctuation will be available. Say you then wanted to insert a â„– (U+2116 NUMERO SIGN) - you could in any half-decent modern piece of software, but oh no, not in AbiWord. It just appears as what appears to be a ° (U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN). In OpenOffice.org Writer it appears as what looks like a (U+0020 SPACE). GTK+, Qt, Gecko, X (or whatever renders xterm and such) can all handle it. Why are these word processors stuck in the olden days of … I don’t know, I’m too young to remember those days.

Speaking of pathetic software, I’m currently on a quest to find a social networking site that doesn’t reject Japanese text. Myspace, Xuqa, and Vampirefreaks apparently suck, and a Japanese site I found was invite-only.

P.S. You know when you’ve been watching too much anime studying too much Japanese when you have to log into a system where you haven’t set your locale to ja_JP.utf8 to find out the English for ８月.

I went through my JLPT level 1 flash cards. There were only 8 I didn’t recognise. So I learnt those. Now I know the 80 kanji in the JLPT level 1 exam, and I know plenty more on top of that.

I remember thinking at some point that the flash cards weren’t much use to me at whichever moment I thought that, but this past week or two I’ve been studying kanji on almost a daily basis and I’m getting to the point where I can read lots of things I couldn’t before.

I’ve been reading previews of comics on Kodansha’s English site, Azuma Kiyohiko’s weblog, text in anime, and pretty much anything I come across.

In an effort to improve my reading skills I have ordered a lot of untranslated manga from Japan.

• あずまんが大王(Azumanga Daioh)〜1から4まで (all of it) - I bought the ADV translation because I liked the series, but ADV did a terrible job of it, so I decided to get the original when I could read it, and I think I’m well on my way to being able to.
• 蟲沛(Mushishi)〜1と2 - I love the TV series, and I read a sample on Koudansha’s English site (amusingly, the mouseover-to-show-English feature didn’t work in Firefox).
• よつばと！(Yotsuba&!)〜1と2 - It’s by the same author as Azumanga Daioh (Azuma Kiyohiko); I couldn’t resist.